The Film Club (9 page)

“I had a girlfriend once,” I said. “All we ever talked about was our relationship. That's what we did instead of having one. It gets to be a real bore. Call her back. Clear it up.”

6

One morning after a heat wave that had lasted nearly a week, the air was suddenly different. There was dew on the car hoods; the clouds seemed unnaturally vivid in their procession across the sky. Autumn, not tomorrow or even the next week, was irreversibly on its way. I was taking a shortcut through the Manulife building on Bloor Street when I spotted Paul Bouissac sitting alone in the café beside the escalator. He was a short, owl-faced Frenchman who had taught me a university course in Surrealism thirty years before and who had maintained a mildly insulting commentary on my career in television ever since. It was beneath him to watch me, he implied, but his boyfriend, a damp-handed nightmare, was a great fan. (Which I rather doubted but never mind.)

Bouissac raised a plump, white hand and waved me over. Obediently I sat down. We talked about this and that, me asking the questions (
comme d'habitude
), him shrugging at their naive provenance. This was the way we conversed. When the subject of Jesse arose (
“Et vous, vous tuez la
journée comment?”
), I launched into my spiel, how a distaste for school was “hardly a pathology,” perhaps even “
quelque
chose d'encourageant
,” how I was dealing with a kid who didn't watch TV or do drugs. That happy children go on to have happy lives, etc., etc., etc. I went on a bit and while I spoke, I found myself experiencing a strange shortness of breath, as if I had just run up a flight of stairs. Bouissac waved me to silence and I could feel my little car, so to speak, pull to the sidewalk with an ungraceful lurch.

“You are being defensive,” he said in heavily accented English. (Forty years in Toronto and still sounding like Charles de Gaulle.) I insisted I wasn't and then grew more so. Explained things that didn't require explaining, defended myself against criticisms which had not been levelled.

“There is a period for learning. After that it is too late,” said Bouissac with the intolerable finality of the French intellectual.

Too late?
Does he mean, I wondered, that learning is like the mastery of a language, you have to “get” the accent before a certain age (twelve or thirteen) or you never get it right? Distressing thought. Should we have sent him to a military school?

Losing interest (and showing it) in my startled reply, Bouissac wandered off in search of a pair of new oven mitts. He was hosting a dinner party for a clutch of international semioticians that very night, the smug little prick. The encounter left me surprisingly jarred. I felt as though I'd betrayed something; had sold myself short. Was I being defensive about Jesse or about myself? Was I boasting like a ten-year-old in the schoolyard? Was it that transparent? Perhaps so. But I didn't want anyone to think I was doing Jesse a bad turn. (I couldn't shake that image of him piloting a marijuana-clouded cab.)

Three teenage girls swished by, smelling of gum and cold air. Perhaps, I thought, the influence we have over our children is an overrated thing. How exactly do you force a six-foot-four teenager to do homework assignments? No, we had already lost that one, his mother and I.

A dislike for Bouissac, like a sudden, unexpected gust of wind, passed over me and I had a feeling that down the road this curious student-like behaviour of mine, this habitual deference, was going to undergo a rather nasty metamorphosis.

Right there at the table, I got out a pen and made a list on a napkin of all the young men I'd gone to university with who hadn't amounted to a hill of beans. There was B., who drank himself to death in Mexico; G., my boyhood best friend who shot a man in the face with a shotgun in a drugged stupor; M., a whiz kid at math, at sports, at everything, whose days were now spent masturbating in front of his computer while his wife worked in a downtown law firm. It was a comforting, dramatic list. There was even my brother, my sad, sad brother; track star, frat king in university, who now lived in the corner room of a boarding house, still railing, even after all these years, about the iniquities of his education.

But what if I'm wrong? What if Jesse didn't come charging out of the basement one of these days and “grab the world by the lapels”? What if I'd allowed him to fuck up his entire life under some misinformed theory that might just be laziness with a smart-ass spin on it? Again, I saw a taxi driving slowly down University Avenue on a rain-slicked night. The graveyard shift. Jesse, a guy they know in the all-night donut store. “Hey, Jess. The usual? That should do her.”

Had he learnt
anything
over the last year under my “tutelage.” Was any of it worth knowing? Let's see. He knows about Elia Kazan and the House Un-American thing, but does he know what communists are? He knows that Vittorio Storaro lit the apartment in
Last Tango in
Paris
by putting the lights on the
outside
of the windows rather than inside on the set, but does he know where Paris is? He knows that you leave your fork face down until your meal is over; that French Cabernets tend to be slightly more sour than California Cabs. (Important stuff.) What else? To eat with your mouth closed (patchy), to brush your tongue as well as your teeth in the morning (catching hold). To rinse the tuna juice from the side of the sink when you're finished making your sandwich (almost).

Oh, but listen. He loves Gary Oldman's psychotic charge down the hall with a shotgun in
The Professional
(1981). He loves Marlon Brando sweeping the dishes off the dining room table in
A Streetcar Named Desire
(1951). “My place is cleared. You want me to clear your places?” He loves
Swimming with Sharks
(1994), not the early moments, “That's just shtick,” but the end part. “That,” he says, “is where it gets quite profound!” He loves Al Pacino in
Scarface
(1983). He loves that movie like I love the parties in
The Great Gatsby
. You know they're naughty and shallow but you want to go to them anyway. He watches
Annie Hall
(1977) over and over. I find the empty DVD case on the couch in the morning. He knows it almost line by line, can quote from it. Ditto with
Hannah
and Her Sisters
(1986). He was knocked cold by Adrian Lyne's
Lolita
(1997). He wants it for Christmas. Are these things I should feel happy about?

Yes, in fact.

But then one day, snow falling outside the living room window, we're watching a replay of
Scarface
, the scene where Al arrives in Miami, when Jesse turns and asks me where Florida is.

“Huh?”

He says, “From here. How do you get to it from here?”

After a judicious pause (is he joking?), I say, “You go south.”

“Toward Eglinton or toward King Street?”

“King Street.”

“Yeah?”

I proceed carefully but respectfully in the tones of one who might at any second be ambushed by a practical joke. But this is no joke. “You go down to King Street and you keep going till you get to the lake; you cross over the lake and that's the beginning of the States.” I wait for him to stop me.

“The United States are right across the lake?” he says.

“Uh-huh.” Pause. “You keep going down through the States, maybe fifteen hundred miles, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, Georgia (still waiting for him to stop me) until you get to a finger-shaped state that sticks out into the water. That's Florida.”

“Oh.” Pause. “What's after that?”

“After Florida?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, let's see. You go right to the bottom of the finger until you hit another patch of water; you keep going another hundred miles, you hit Cuba. Remember Cuba? That's where we had that long conversation about Rebecca.”

“That was a great conversation.”

“Stay with me,” I say. “You go past Cuba, a long way past until you get to South America.”

“Is that a country?”

Pause. “No, that's a continent. You keep on going, thousands and thousands of miles, jungles and cities, jungles and cities, all the way down to the end of Argentina.”

He stares into space. He is seeing something very vivid in his imagination, but God knows what it is.

“Is that the end of the world?” he asks.

“Pretty much.”

Am I doing the right thing here?

It was spring now on Maggie's street. The trees, budding at their very tips like fingernails, appeared to be extending their branches toward the sun. It was in the course of showing one of these highfalutin art movies that something very odd happened, a perfect illustration of the very lesson the movie was trying to teach. It started when I heard the house next door was for sale. Not our through-the-wall neighbour, Eleanor—the only way she was leaving her place was feet first with a Union Jack clamped to her forehead—but the couple on the other side, the snake-slim woman in the sunglasses and her bald husband.

Entirely by coincidence I picked that week to show Jesse the Italian classic
The Bicycle Thief
(1948). Just the saddest story ever. An unemployed guy needs a bike for a job, gets one with great difficulty; his whole demeanour changes, his sexual confidence returns. But the bike gets stolen the next day. He's in agony. The actor, Lamberto Maggiorani, has the face of an inarticulate, devastated child. What's he to do? No bike, no job. It's almost too upsetting to watch as he runs all over town with his son looking for the lost vehicle. Then he spots an unguarded bicycle and steals it. In other words, he chooses to inflict the same agony on somebody else that has been visited upon him. It's for his family's welfare, he rationalizes, it's not like the other guy, the point being, I explain, that we sometimes calibrate our moral positions, what's right, what's wrong, depending on what we need at that particular moment. Jesse nods; the idea engages him. You can see him rumbling about in the incidents of his own life, stopping here and there, looking for a parallel.

But the bicycle thief gets caught; and caught publicly. It's as if the whole neighbourhood turns out to see him hauled away. Including his son, on whose face is an expression none of us ever wants to see on our children's faces.

The day after the screening, maybe a few days later, I can't recall, there were comings and goings next door; I saw a skinny, rat-faced fellow nosing around in the lane-way among my new garbage cans. Then one morning, the city looking grey in a sort of fortified way, puddles and litter in the streets as if the tide had gone out (you almost expected to see a dying fish flapping in the gutters), a For Sale sign appeared.

I found myself wondering, idly at first, then with increasing momentum, if I should sell my bachelor loft in the candy factory (it had appreciated wildly), and move in next door to my son and my beloved ex-wife. Provided they wanted me, of course. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it. The more urgent it seemed. In a matter of days, the question assumed almost life-saving significance. I might even, I concluded, have a little living money left over from the down payment. This wasn't how I thought my life would go but I'd had worse ideas. Maybe it would change my luck, just living near the two of them. So late one afternoon, my sexy neighbour in sunglasses pulled to the corner in her small, utilitarian car and hurried up the steps, briefcase in hand.

“I hear you're selling your house,” I said.

“That's right,” she said, not missing a beat, slipping the key into the lock.

“Any chance I could have an advance peek?”

You could see that the rat-faced real estate agent had warned her against doing exactly this. But she was a decent soul and said, sure.

It was a little man's house, a Frenchman's house, but clean and welcoming, even in the recesses of the basement (unlike Maggie's basement where, just past the washing machine, one feared a crocodile attack). Narrow hallways, narrow stairs, meticulously painted bedrooms, detailed border work and a bathroom medicine cabinet that prompted curiosity—although given her clear complexion, her aura of constant and purposeful motion, she didn't seem the kind to have any pills worth pinching.

“How much?” I asked.

She named a figure. It was absurdly high, naturally, but then so was the recent appraisal of my candy factory loft which had, so I was told, “come into fashion” with a whole species of obnoxious young success stories (cellphones, three-day beard). A place for winners, for swingers. For assholes, in a word.

I explained my situation: I passionately wanted to live near my teenage son and my ex-wife. That took her aback. Could she let me have first crack at buying the house? Yes, she said. She'd talk to her husband.

There was quite the flurry of activity at our house. Calls to the bank, to Maggie at the loft (a delighted green light accompanied by moist eyes), another chat with Slim next door. Everything looking good.

But then, for reasons I couldn't fathom, Slim and her egg-head husband decided not to offer us first anything. There would be two showings, he informed me stiffly one evening, after which we were welcome to make a bid. Along with everyone else. Not good news. Greektown was coming into vogue as well; the prices were terrifying. Houses were getting two hundred thousand dollars more than the asking price.

A day or two before “show day” I took Jesse aside. I asked him to round up a bunch of his buddies for an afternoon on the porch. Beer and cigarettes on me. Starting time, exactly 2:00 p.m.

You can imagine the spectacle. As potential buyers fluttered up the stairs next door, they passed a half-dozen drinking, smoking, toque-wearing “louts” in sunglasses and pale complexions on the adjacent porch. Their new “neighbours,” three feet away. Some cars stopped, paused for an inspection, two moons frozen in the passenger window, and then moved away.